Posted tagged ‘Immigration’

House Republican leaders intervened Friday to prevent a vote on immigration legislation, dealing a severe blow to election-year efforts to overhaul the dysfunctional system.

The move came after a Republican congressman from California announced plans to try to force a vote next week, over strong conservative opposition, on his measure creating a path to citizenship for immigrants who were brought illegally to the U.S. as children and serve in the military.

Rep. Jeff Denham labeled his bill the ENLIST Act and said he would seek a vote as an amendment to the popular annual defense bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA. [Original at Huffington Post. You’ve been warned]

Of note, beyond the obvious — Cantor and his colleagues are killing a Republican sponsored immigration bill — is the fascination in watching the tail wag the dog:

Denham’s measure was widely popular and seen as perhaps the likeliest area for compromise.

But in recent weeks prominent conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation, announced their opposition. Heritage Action, the group’s political arm, announced it would include the vote in its ratings on lawmakers and called Denham’s legislation “deplorable.”

What does Jim Demint possess along with those two little spheres in his hands?…(answer to come in the comments, no doubt).

Truly amazing. I know the coming election looks tough, but it really does help when the opposing party hands its fortunes over to the likes of Heritage.

The Constitution says a majority. It doesn’t say the Hastert rule, or sometimes the Hastert rule, or when I feel like it the Hastert rule. It says the majority. And there are ways to achieve the majority that I hope they will pursue.

IOW: that fig leaf you’re looking for to pretend that it’s someone else’s fault you can’t deliver on a matter of utmost interest to the nation’s largest growing voting block? Ain’t there.

IOOW — Sez Nancy to John: you want to deliver the Latino, Asian, and much else besides vote to the Democrats for a generation? Be my guest.

More of this please. With lots of on the ground organization for 2014 and 16.

Fresh on the heels of the President Obama’s executive order allowing temporary residency for those undocumented immigrant kids brought to the country as children, North Carolina’s Republican leaders have come up with this:

Gov. Pat McCrory says he signed off on the controversial “pink licenses” that will be issued to some young illegal immigrants who were granted protection from deportation for two years.

The new North Carolina governor said he thought it was important that the driver’s licenses for immigrants clearly distinguish “between legal presence versus legal status.”

Critics have decried them as a modern-day scarlet letter. The new driver’s licenses will have a bright pink stripe and bold words “NO LAWFUL STATUS,” written in red capital letters across the front, according to mock-ups. (h/t Think Progress)

I’ve can’t shake this image: I’m seeing those old ship bridge telegraphs to the engine room. You know — the ones with a lever that pulls the marker round one side of a circular dial that reads “Ahead Full; Ahead Half; Slow Astern: and so on.

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Except in this case it’s a personality dial and the GOP’s is frozen in place all the way ’round at “Full Asshole.”

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Seriously? A pink stripe? Might as well go full Hawthorne and require these young men and women to wear a vivid red U on their persons whenever they summon the temerity to use a public thoroughfare.

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This is just mean, of course: a deliberate slap and perhaps worse, extended to some of our most vulnerable neighbors. I wish it weren’t happening.

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But there is one useful element to all this. Once again we all see, in this demographically evolving America, just where our friends on the right side of the aisle — and the wrong one of history — actually stand.